Make your decisions in a vaccum.
How often do we make decisions ourselves? I don't mean to join the discussion on free will. So, knowing it lurks around a few corners from here, I shall try to stay weary of the edge and focused on what would at least 'appear' to be us making choices.
Most people, I am sure, recognize this pattern; You are somewhere, anywhere, and you are left to your own devices. Pun very much intended. You are unsure of what to do next. So you grab your phone, or open up your laptop half knowing, half not knowing what to do.
The latest tab in your browser, or your notifications gladly guide you into their realm. What happens next is anybodys guess. You may look up 20 minutes later, noticing you missed your stop. Or maybe, you are now on the other side of the earth. In any case, you immediately understand that spending your time like this, was not really a concious choice.
I am getting really good at staying off of my phone. I still fall in sometimes, but I am constantly working to make sure I don't ever get sucked in for long periods at a time. This might be a fools errand when you own a smart phone. However, I do think it is possible to walk a fine line where you can enjoy the best of both worlds.
For the past couple of weeks, I have been challenged with a sort of confused state of mind. I wish to do a lot of things, but I cannot pull myself together and just do them. I suspect a reason might be that I have gotten worse at making my own decisions.
Like a an unaware slow boiling frog, I have been relying more and more on my laptop for deciding what to do next. Even though I have been reading a lot more lately, whenever I wasn't up for that, I would just open my laptop and see what happened.
This can be fine on occasion. Lucky for me this morning, I was stubborn enough to challenge myself on this. As the weekend movie was popped into the VCR giving me a solid hour of passified children, I was about to open my laptop. But I didn't.
I wanted to know EXACTLY why I wanted to open it. It just felt like a reflex that I needed to pursue. I sat down with my coffee on the opposite side of the dining room table, staring at my closed laptop. I realized I didn't really have any reason to open it.
I realized that I didn't really know why I was even considering opening it up. I leaned towards picking up where I left off, in David Grohl's book "Storyteller", (Highly recommend this book by the way). But Ssmething was drawing me still to the laptop. Yet, I didn't know what. I needed to investiate this behaviour further.
I made a deal with the De.. myself. If I could come up with a good reason to even open the damned thing, then sure, let's go ahead and do so. This felt like a profound moment to me. I felt in control. Truly in control of what I wanted to do. Thinking back on it now, the sensation was also of purpose. After som minutes of contemplation, I did actually find a reason for using the latptop: I wanted to write about this moment. Which is what I am doing right now. Oh my, so meta!
I want to round this off before my mind starts wandering elsewhere. I want to make more decisions in this manner. Taking my sweet time. In the end, taking 5 or more minutes to make a really good choice, one which will refuel me or make my day better, is way better than using no time, acting on reflex and potentially wasting an hour. Which might even cascade into bad decisions for the rest of the day.
What about you? do you roll the die with your time as well? Maybe try out what I did next time. See what happens.
- Trolz
How often do we make decisions ourselves? I don't mean to join the discussion on free will. So, knowing it lurks around a few corners from here, I shall try to stay weary of the edge and focused on what would at least 'appear' to be us making choices.
Most people, I am sure, recognize this pattern; You are somewhere, anywhere, and you are left to your own devices. Pun very much intended. You are unsure of what to do next. So you grab your phone, or open up your laptop half knowing, half not knowing what to do.
The latest tab in your browser, or your notifications gladly guide you into their realm. What happens next is anybodys guess. You may look up 20 minutes later, noticing you missed your stop. Or maybe, you are now on the other side of the earth. In any case, you immediately understand that spending your time like this, was not really a concious choice.
I am getting really good at staying off of my phone. I still fall in sometimes, but I am constantly working to make sure I don't ever get sucked in for long periods at a time. This might be a fools errand when you own a smart phone. However, I do think it is possible to walk a fine line where you can enjoy the best of both worlds.
For the past couple of weeks, I have been challenged with a sort of confused state of mind. I wish to do a lot of things, but I cannot pull myself together and just do them. I suspect a reason might be that I have gotten worse at making my own decisions.
Like a an unaware slow boiling frog, I have been relying more and more on my laptop for deciding what to do next. Even though I have been reading a lot more lately, whenever I wasn't up for that, I would just open my laptop and see what happened.
This can be fine on occasion. Lucky for me this morning, I was stubborn enough to challenge myself on this. As the weekend movie was popped into the VCR giving me a solid hour of passified children, I was about to open my laptop. But I didn't.
I wanted to know EXACTLY why I wanted to open it. It just felt like a reflex that I needed to pursue. I sat down with my coffee on the opposite side of the dining room table, staring at my closed laptop. I realized I didn't really have any reason to open it.
I realized that I didn't really know why I was even considering opening it up. I leaned towards picking up where I left off, in David Grohl's book "Storyteller", (Highly recommend this book by the way). But Ssmething was drawing me still to the laptop. Yet, I didn't know what. I needed to investiate this behaviour further.
I made a deal with the De.. myself. If I could come up with a good reason to even open the damned thing, then sure, let's go ahead and do so. This felt like a profound moment to me. I felt in control. Truly in control of what I wanted to do. Thinking back on it now, the sensation was also of purpose. After som minutes of contemplation, I did actually find a reason for using the latptop: I wanted to write about this moment. Which is what I am doing right now. Oh my, so meta!
I want to round this off before my mind starts wandering elsewhere. I want to make more decisions in this manner. Taking my sweet time. In the end, taking 5 or more minutes to make a really good choice, one which will refuel me or make my day better, is way better than using no time, acting on reflex and potentially wasting an hour. Which might even cascade into bad decisions for the rest of the day.
What about you? do you roll the die with your time as well? Maybe try out what I did next time. See what happens.
- Trolz